Rougher Road for Democrats With Obama Off Ticket

CINCINNATI — The congressman was dripping with sweat, and his face was as red as a tomato as he moved through a crowded park here, passing out dozens of plastic cups bearing his name.

“Hi, I’m Steve Driehaus,” he said, leaning down to shake a woman’s hand. “I’m your congressman, and I need your help in November.”

While all candidates ask voters for support, the pitch from Mr. Driehaus is more pointed than most. He is among the class of Democrats who face the challenge of running in difficult districts without the same enthusiasm and expected voter turnout that helped the party expand its Congressional majorities when Barack Obama led the ticket two years ago.

The race highlights a central question of this election cycle: What chance do Democrats have of defending House districts, like the one here in Cincinnati and a dozen more across the country, where, by narrow margins in 2008, they captured seats held by Republicans?

To hold these seats and to protect others that are vulnerable, Democrats are trying to re-create the Obama campaign machinery and expand turnout beyond a typical midterm election to compete with a particularly motivated Republican base.

The prospects for Democrats holding on to the House, and perhaps even the Senate, could rest with whether legions of first-time or occasional voters who supported Mr. Obama, including a high percentage of African-Americans, return to the polls this year.

The contest in Ohio’s First Congressional District offers one of the best case studies in the country. The campaign is among a dozen rematches in this election cycle: Steve Chabot, who was first elected in the 1994 Republican sweep, lost his seat to Mr. Driehaus by four percentage points — 14,772 votes — and is fighting to win it back.

“I think people are ready for a change from the change,” Mr. Chabot said in an interview at his storefront headquarters, decorated with signs and banners from his previous races. “The change that they’ve seen isn’t what a lot of people had in mind.”

If Republicans are to win control of the House, party leaders are relying on candidates like Mr. Chabot to whittle away the 39-seat Democratic majority. Their strategy is rooted in the belief that the Republican base is significantly more energized than it was two years ago, particularly because of the influence of Tea Party activists and at least a share of independent voters who have soured on the leadership of Democrats.

Mr. Chabot is seeking to make the race a national referendum on every major element of the Democratic agenda, from health care to the economic stimulus plan to the growth of federal spending. Mr. Driehaus is working to localize the race, telling voters how they have benefited from the health care law and reminding them that road projects and development along the banks of the Ohio River are their own piece of the $787 billion stimulus package.

Their arguments have yet to hit the airwaves — both sides are rationing money for an aggressive fall campaign — but they previewed familiar lines of attack last weekend as they met voters at neighborhood fairs and sat for separate interviews.

In short, Mr. Chabot hopes to tie his opponent to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, whom he calls “extremely unpopular here,” while Mr. Driehaus believes he can be seen as his own man, a product of the West Side, who lives in his old neighborhood and still works the summer festival alongside fellow parishioners at St. Teresa of Avila Catholic Church.

“But when the electorate is angry, when the electorate is anxious, they’re going to look for somebody to blame,” Mr. Driehaus said. “And that would be us.”

As some Democratic candidates balance how closely to align themselves with the president, Mr. Driehaus believes that his best path to winning a second term is to remind voters who remain loyal to Mr. Obama of the consequences of the midterm election. He declared to a group of Hispanic voters, “I was happy to run with President Obama on the ticket.”

Later, at the opening of a local office of Organizing for America, the outgrowth of the Obama campaign that works to increase voter turnout, Mr. Driehaus said: “If you believed in hope in 2008, if you believed in change in 2008, this election is about delivering on that change. It’s just that simple. We can keep moving forward or we can go back.”

The Congressional race, which includes most of Cincinnati and several suburbs and townships, offers a laboratory on how Democrats are working to hold their majority in the House. Two years ago, 53 percent of voters here in Hamilton County selected Mr. Obama, the first time a Democratic candidate for president won in 44 years.

Now, four months before Election Day, Democratic campaign workers are trying to follow the road map from 2008, right down to selecting the same office headquarters along Springfield Pike and at the Jordan Crossing Center on Reading Road, the first shopping mall in the largely black neighborhood of Bond Hill. The first task: re-creating their get-out-the-vote teams, block by block.

“Our job is to make sure people don’t take a pass on the midterm,” said Ken Shewmon, a management consultant who volunteers as a Democratic neighborhood team leader. “We know who they are, we know where they are, we know their phone numbers.

“We’re a little bit early now,” he said, “but if we don’t see a lot of volunteers by August, that’s a problem.”

Mr. Chabot said he was impressed by the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote operation, particularly the absentee ballot program, which he plans to try to replicate. He conducted a precinct-by-precinct analysis of the 2008 race, which he said found an “unusually skewed turnout” with margins that increased by 30 percent in Democratic areas and dropped by 10 percent in Republican areas.

“It would have been different if I would have gotten voted out on some kind of scandal or if we’d lost touch with the district, but that didn’t happen,” Mr. Chabot said. “Republicans were not particularly pleased with the nature of the national ticket, and they weren’t very excited.”

This time, as much as the race may be affected by the national mood, along with a 9.4 percent unemployment rate here, it also could be determined by hyperlocal statistics. Will Mr. Driehaus and his Democratic organization repeat the voter turnout of more than 70 percent in the city’s largely black Seventh Ward? Will voters be motivated to stand in line for hours — often wrapping around the county election headquarters on Broadway Street — to cast early ballots?

Lincoln Ware, who hosts a daily radio show with a large African-American audience that is a regular stop for political candidates, wonders whether the enthusiasm among voters in this midterm election year can measure up.

“I just don’t think we’re going to have that voter turnout, especially on the Democratic side because Obama’s not running this term,” Mr. Ware said. “It’s going to be real tough for Driehaus to come back. Chabot is real serious about taking that seat back.”

There are several factors that could influence the race in new ways, particularly the rise of the Tea Party. While conservative groups have rejected many establishment Republicans, Mr. Chabot has been embraced by local Tea Party organizers, in part because he voted in 2008 against legislation to bail out the banking industry. Several Republican candidates across the country who supported the measure have lost primary campaigns this year to Tea Party-backed candidates.

“There’s a lot of frustration in the Tea Party movement with career politicians, but it’s really only because of those people who go to Washington and change,” said Mike Wilson, the founder of the Cincinnati Tea Party. “It’s not so much that people are happy with Republicans right now, it’s that they are very angry with the Democrats.”

Ben Werschkul contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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